[smygo] Looted Iraqi Relics Slow to Surface
Dan Clore
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
[Note that the Geneva conventions *require* occupying forces
to guard cultural sites.--DC]
Looted Iraqi Relics Slow To Surface
Some Famous Pieces Unlikely to Reappear
By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 8, 2005
A01
More than 2 1/2 years after looters sacked Iraq's National
Museum in Baghdad, Iraqi authorities and police forces
throughout the world are still searching for thousands of
stolen items, including a handful of the most famous
artifacts in history.
U.S. military sources say forces in Iraq have no systematic
way of investigating the missing objects, and in the ongoing
insurgency neither U.S. nor Iraqi forces can justify using
scarce manpower to guard sites in the countryside, where
widespread looting has continued unchecked since the March
2003 U.S. invasion.
Law enforcement organizations worldwide are chasing the lost
items, but their representatives said there is no systematic
coordination, and they are relying on a shifting set of ad
hoc partnerships to bring the thieves to account.
Marine Col. Matthew Bogdanos, charged with recovering the
museum treasures in the six months after the fall of Saddam
Hussein, eventually counted about 14,000 lost items, of
which about 5,500 have been recovered.
Perhaps not surprisingly, only a few high-quality looted
pieces have reappeared since the end of 2003. Yet
paradoxically, although lower-end artifacts occasionally are
placed for auction on the Internet, there has been no
serious upsurge in public sales of Iraqi antiquities, either
in the United States or Europe.
Experts attribute the absence of a market to a combination
of factors, none of them verifiable. Tough laws in Britain
and the United States may have scared off known dealers,
some say, or smugglers may simply have stashed their prizes
in warehouses until they think it is safe.
Others suggest that it takes a few years for stolen goods to
migrate from the Middle East to shops in London, Tokyo or
New York. Still others suspect the loot has gone to
collectors in nearby states along the Persian Gulf, where
Mesopotamian artifacts enjoy a stature they never attained
in the West.
Most sources agree, however, that the most famous pieces are
too hot ever to be handled again in public. Without
sophisticated police work, help from the art world and
patience, the only people who will ever see them are the
millionaires who buy them on the black market and lock them
away.
"I teach about it all the time," said Columbia University
art historian Zainab Bahrani, recalling the missing Sumerian
black statue of Eannatum, prince of Lagash, one of the
earliest royal sculptures to bear an inscription. "I explain
why it is important, but in the back of my mind I'm
thinking, 'It's gone . . . it's gone.' "
Bahrani is one of a relatively small number of specialists
in academia, the art world and law enforcement who continue
to track the fortunes of Iraq's stolen patrimony.
The danger was obvious. Iraq is the birthplace of
civilization, where ancient peoples left behind a cornucopia
of cultural heritage at thousands of sites over thousands of
years. The patriarch Abraham lived in what is today Iraq,
and Imam Ali, the founder of Shiite Islam, was martyred there.
Two months before the 2003 invasion, a small group of
experts warned Pentagon officials about the possibility of
looting once the shooting stopped. It had happened in the
chaos after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and U.S. forces could
expect the same this time, they said.
And so it proved. As U.S. tanks entered Baghdad in April,
mobs broke into the National Museum and stole, burned or
destroyed everything they could find. It was not as bad as
expected because staff members had spirited most of the
famous exhibits out of the museum to secret hiding places.
But it was bad enough.
No one has disputed Bogdanos's figures on museum losses, but
he cautioned that the numbers of both missing and recovered
pieces will rise as the staff continues to inventory
pillaged storerooms.
Outside the capital, looting of known archaeological sites
has proceeded unimpeded, and there is no end in sight as
long as overburdened U.S. and Iraqi security forces remain
preoccupied with battling insurgents.
"When Saddam found looters, he killed them," said Bogdanos,
a reservist who works as a Manhattan prosecutor in civilian
life and who has recounted his experiences in a new book,
"Thieves of Baghdad." "We told the Iraqis right away that we
weren't going to fly helicopters over the sites and start
shooting people."
Bogdanos has compiled the accepted "top 40" list of the most
famous pieces stolen from the National Museum. Fifteen have
been recovered, including the Sumerian vase of Warka, the
mask of Warka and an Assyrian wheeled firebox made of
bronze. The Akkadian Bassetki statue, of a boy cast in
copper, was found in November 2003 at the bottom of a
Baghdad cesspool.
The 25 missing items include Bahrani's Sumerian statue, the
gold-and-ivory carved plaque of a lioness attacking a
Nubian, and the almost life-size head of the Goddess of
Victory, from Hatra, made of copper.
"You're never going to see these in a gallery," Bahrani
said. "No art dealer would ever touch them, because they're
just too well known. We're talking about a black market.
These pieces will never see the light of day."
The second category includes about 8,000 small items taken
from the museum basement in what Bogdanos calls "clearly an
inside job." Thieves with keys "cherry-picked" obscure
storerooms for pendants, amulets, decorative pins and about
5,000 distinctively Mesopotamian "cylinder seals."
These carved finger-sized pieces of stone leave a
distinctive design when rolled over soft clay. Each has a
museum number written on it in nearly indelible India ink,
and the whole collection, Bogdanos said, would fit in a
backpack.
These are the most saleable of all the stolen items -- easy
to hide and transport, distinctive and authenticated as
museum pieces. Most of the high-profile items recovered
outside Iraq are cylinder seals, including eight that were
voluntarily handed over to the FBI by a returning Marine and
three taken by customs agents from journalist Joseph Braude
at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport.
Bogdanos, lead investigator in the Braude case, was
disappointed by the sentence of six months of house arrest
and two years of probation.
Since Bogdanos departed Iraq, U.S. forces no longer have a
systematic way to search for artifacts, and the effort has
devolved upon an assortment of organizations, including,
among many others, the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and
Heritage, Interpol, the FBI and cylinder-seal experts at the
University of Chicago's Oriental Institute. "There is no
coordination," Bogdanos said. "It's based on personal
relationships, and when it works, it's a surprise."
But there is little evidence that anyone in the United
States or Europe is taking advantage. In fact, whatever
market there was for Iraqi antiquities appears to be drying
up. "The items that are coming to auction are much better
provenanced [authenticated]," said William Weber of the
London-based Art Loss Register. "Dealers have to be very
careful with this material."
Britain's draconian 2003 Iraq Sanctions Order has put the
burden of proof on a dealer to show that an artifact is not
stolen. The United States has lifted general trade sanctions
on Iraq imposed after the Gulf War but left them in place
for cultural property.
Neil Brodie, director of the Antiquities Research Center at
Cambridge University's McDonald Institute for Archaeological
Research, credits the new British law with the collapse of
the London market. "I thought it would go right to New
York," he said in a telephone interview, "but it hasn't
happened."
That is because "people here at the high end understand that
this is illegal," said New York lawyer William Pearlstein,
who frequently represents antiquities dealers, collectors
and auction houses. "We have a very heavily policed
antiquities market, and the message has gotten through."
Still, there appears to be no disagreement that looting
continues. Until recently, what little evidence there was
came from risky field trips by journalists, military reports
from the Iraqi hinterland and the occasional helicopter flyover.
Stony Brook University archaeologist Elizabeth Stone,
however, has been leading an effort to compare "before and
after" satellite photographs of well-known sites in southern
Iraq, and has found holes "denser than Swiss cheese."
The artifacts recovered from these sites are a grab bag that
includes some cylinder seals, pottery, clay tablets, stone
carvings and other small items. But a lot of it is probably
valuable. Where is it going?
Stone suggested that somewhere "there are warehouses bulging
at the seams," waiting for vigilance to relax and laws to
expire. Pearlstein thinks the artifacts are traveling to
"virtually unregulated" markets in the Persian Gulf states.
DePaul University's Patty Gerstenblith, an expert on
cultural property law, believes the sanctions may have
forced thieves to make a cost-benefit calculation. "It will
be too dangerous for collectors to buy the well-known
items," she said, and not worth the risk for smugglers to
sell the cheap stuff.
--
Dan Clore
Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://www.wildsidepress.com/index2.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154838/thedanclorenecro
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Don't forget to question me."
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